The hidden world that birds see
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A few years ago, scientists put a tracker on it, and they found that it flew for 11 straight days, so over 8,000 miles. And it was just in the air the whole time, flying over the Pacific Ocean. Scientists used to think birds were using the sun or the stars or some kind of vague, undefined instinct. But it seems like birds are also sensing Earth's magnetic field. They're sensing magnetism. Magnetism is this fundamental force of the universe that we can't see or feel, but it's powerful enough to shape stars, it protects planets, it moves compass needles, and somehow it guides birds across entire oceans. But magnetoreception is the only sense where we don't know what part of the body is doing the sensing.
One researcher called it the holy grail of sensory biology. I wanted to figure out how much we don't know about all this, how much is still unexplainable. So I called up Ed Yong. Ed's one of the best science writers working today. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his work covering COVID and public health during the pandemic. But more recently, he wrote a very different kind of book. It's called An Immense World. How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. It's about birds that might see magnetism, dogs that can smell time, fish that can sense electric fields, and all the ways animals live inside realities we can barely imagine. And if we grapple with that, if we really try to take that understanding seriously,
it might change the way we see ourselves.
Hi Ed, thanks for coming on the show. Hi, thanks for having me. So you won a Pulitzer for your reporting during the pandemic. How'd you get into animals?
It's actually the other way around, really. I was into animals for as long as I was into anything. As a child, I went to zoos and watched nature documentaries and read books about wildlife that were way too advanced for me, but had very beautiful pictures. So I've loved the natural world for my entire life.
Yeah.
So you wrote this book called An Immense World. It's all about the various diverse ways that animals perceive the world we live in. I really want to focus on birds in particular. Great. How did scientists figure out birds weren't just using the sun or weren't just remembering where to go? Like, how did they realize this was an actual sensory system that could sense magnetism?
Yeah, so this goes back to the 1950s when some German ornithologists were watching birds at the time when they're about getting ready to migrate. Birds show this restlessness, this anxiety that in German is called Zugenruhe. And these scientists just looked at these birds and realized that... Their restlessness wasn't just random. They tended to hop in a particular direction. Like they had this sort of sense of which direction to go in.
They're like hopping in the direction that they kind of want to migrate?
Totally, yeah. You could put them in a cage. You could put the cage in a room that's completely isolated.
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